New global analysis: U.S. below average in math, few top achievers

About half a million students from around the world completed assessments in mathematics, reading and science in 2012, leading to results presented by the Program for International Student Assessment this morning.

If you click the image below you’ll get a larger view of the primary results from the survey:

Snapshot of performance in mathematics, reading and science. (PISA)

Some key results:

Among the 34 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries, the United States performed below average in 2012 in mathematics (rank 26) comparable with Hungary, Italy, Lithuania, Norway, Portugal, the Russian Federation, the Slovak Republic, Spain and Sweden.

In reading, the United States performed around the average (rank 17), comparable with Austria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Hungary, Israel, Italy, Norway, Portugal, the United Kingdom and Vietnam.

In science, the performance of the United States was also close to the OECD average (rank 21) and comparable with that of Austria, Belgium, Croatia, Denmark, France, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Norway, Portugal and Spain.

What’s really concerning to me is the third column, which shows the share of the country’s population that performed at the highest level of the mathematics assessment. We can consider this to be a proxy for the overachieving scientists and technology entrepreneurs who will start the Microsofts, Googles and Facebooks of the coming decades, in short the engines of our continuing prosperity.

In the high performing countries one-quarter to one-half of students performed at the highest level. In the United States, just 8 percent of students did.

In the summary of United States results the authors of the study point to one key weakness in U.S. students — the ability to apply mathematics to real world situations. This is a problem, obviously, because most of the natural world can be explained by math.